Boys & Girls

by Paul Burston

  tonight

  LISTENING OUT FOR THE SEA

  KEITH JARRETT

  ‘You’re a beautiful young man.’

  Samuel watches Dr Glenn’s feet, the older man’s chair scraping on the wooden floor towards him as he speaks. Dr Glenn is now so close he can rest the fat worm of his pointing finger on Samuel’s knee. The room feels smaller every second.

  Samuel meets Dr Glenn’s gaze and then drops his eyes back down, until they are fixed on the finger, which then becomes a whole hand, firmly grasping his leg. He squeezes Samuel’s leg briefly then leaves the hand there for a moment that feels uncomfortably long. Samuel can feel Dr Glenn’s eyes on him and his squashed mouth ready to continue speaking; for now, though, all he can hear are the seconds on the clock as they sit in silence. Samuel has no idea what he’s meant to say.

  If his mother wasn’t behind the door, he would have considered taking Dr Glenn’s hand higher, higher up the lap ladder until he could close it around where he’s already beginning to uncurl for action, and only then would he shout loudly, how dare the perving faggot touch him, and run out. He would run and not stop; ever.

  That’s not exactly how it was that time with Anthony Seager; not exactly, but almost. Even after all the days they spent out together on their bikes, up and down Manor Gate looking out for an easy lift, with their caps to one side, he couldn’t change what happened. Everyone at Buckleys’ knew the code: cap one side is danger, the other side ok; and the two of them were dangerous, always. They’d made legends of themselves that spread around school in whispered wows. Anthony with the scissors, jumping off his bike to snip off a shoulder bag, while he was already peddling ahead waiting for the throw. How they bumped several Year 8s, selling them cut up leaves for twenty at time, while they toked, sniffed and swallowed cocktails of gear so mind-fuckingly strong that a) they must have a direct link-up in Amsterdam and b) they were lucky to be alive.

  It was the purple buds that did it. The unusually hot afternoon when they bunked school and lay down on the Marshes, puffing Os that disappeared up into the clouds through the long grass, golden brown. They were half-hidden there, voices drowned out by the traffic behind them and yapping dogs ahead, where the flat ground was. Anthony’s sweat-soaked school shirt was draped over his bike but Samuel kept his on, dark grey patches trickling down the sides.

  ‘You know what?’ Anthony had said, rolling his head towards him and knocking his cap off in the process.

  Anthony’s hand strayed onto his shoulder, light and playful. Samuel felt his heart do a double-tap. The sun beat down on his head as he relit the weed and took a drag.

  They looked at each other for a while, Samuel taking in the zigzag of Anthony’s cane row hair and his uneven ears, sticking out like trophy handles. The silver stud on his left earlobe, the shape of a tick, flashed bright in the sunshine. Anthony stared back at him. The dogs in the distance barked louder.

  ‘Yep’ Samuel answered after a long pause, exhaling smoke at the same time. He got up to lay on his side so he could pass back the blunt.

  ‘You’re such a eediot! “Yep!”’ Anthony laughed him off as he waved a fly away, turning his head from him.

  Samuel’s hand hovered over Anthony’s body, waiting for a reaction.

  Anthony took the joint from the boy’s extended hand after a while. As their fingers brushed, a tingle – just a small jolt of electricity – carried itself up the boy’s arm. He put his hand back down on the damp ground and tried not to notice how close it was to Anthony’s bare chest, which already seemed darker after just one day in the sun. He tried to avoid thinking about how tight Anthony’s stomach looked, wisps of hair disappearing down into his trousers. He tugged at a clump of grass, and a few stalks broke off in his fist.

  Shit, he thought. He’d never before allowed Anthony to rise to the front of his mind while they were together. Not in that way. Allowing to rise. So high these thoughts are rising to the sky… Letting my mind drift with the spliff… Samuel kicked the rest of his thoughts away with a freestyle rhyme, and soon he knew he would be spitting bars with Anthony and they would be joking together, as soon as he could temporarily bring his dry mouth to open, as soon as he had the strength to sit up and roll another. And he could forget the eye contact and the rise and fall of Anthony’s belly and daydreams of them fucking.

  When Samuel nodded his head back to the ground, he caught Anthony’s eyes again. Their bodies seemed closer; Anthony’s diamond eyes carving deeper into his head, eyes that were fixed on him.

  It was Samuel’s hands that did it; not him. His hands which wandered all the way down from Anthony’s belly button to his belt loops and to the bulge in his trousers, even though it wasn’t safe, right there, in the open where anyone could pass through if they were following the smell of their smoke. But then mouths were pressed over lips, and hands explored beneath waistbands.

  It all felt natural and real until Anthony pulled away and said what he said.

  ‘I see it’s been hard for you’. Dr Glenn smiles, his saggy cheeks pushing outwards, but lips still pressed together. ‘There’s a lot of guilt… and shame there,’ he says, removing the hand from Samuel’s knee and tapping his own heart loudly with a knuckle.

  There’s a moment in which the boy feels his eyes get hotter, and then he breathes in and it goes. The air in the room is all wrong; the mean windows are wide open but it feels like he’s suffocating.

  ‘But there’s no need for you to feel guilty about these feelings anymore –’

  ‘How can I –?’ the thin, squeaking voice leaks out from him.

  ‘“There is therefore now no more condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”’ Dr Glenn pauses and sucks in all the air that is left in the room. ‘Romans 8:1. The last bit is the key’, he continues. ‘Now you are in Christ Jesus, you no longer have to walk after the flesh – you can be free from it.’

  Dr Glenn’s peanut-shaped head bounces side to side as he speaks, and he slides up his glasses with the same wormy finger that was on his knee minutes ago. You’re a beautiful young man.

  The boy wonders about being free. The moment before Anthony told him, he felt free; lying on the grass in September, the unexpected heat which made going to school that day too stupid an idea. Free for a second, knowing that he would get into big trouble for bunking again; knowing that his mother would drag him to the Pastor again; and not knowing yet what Anthony was about to say, just a few small words he couldn’t erase.

  I was hoping you’d do that a long time ago. Like he’d been waiting for him, setting a trap. All along, Anthony had been the batty boy. Anthony had egged him on to skip school with him, hang out and play video games at his house on the weekend and check girls near Mad Riddims, where they spent their money on mix tapes, for what?

  Samuel replayed it in his head: a shout, coming from them both; the sound of his fist on a face he’d just kissed; feeling his shirt being pulled, choking around his neck; looking for something to hold onto; the pain of bite marks; the pulse throbbing in his hand, and then, later, the thud in his head as he remembered the look on Anthony’s face.

  All along, it was Anthony who’d been checking him out. Anthony had picked him out as a friend not because he was smart but because he’d already planned that afternoon. It made him sick. Everyone must have been laughing behind his back.

  By the end of that day, he’d already decided to get some more of the Buckley boys in on it before Anthony did; he’d need back up for next time.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing that you yourself have done which caused you to have these feelings’, Dr Glenn says, from a faraway place. ‘They’re just feelings, not who you are… Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise’.

  Dr Glenn is leaning forward again and staring him in the eyes. He comes into focus mid-sentence.

  ‘I see you have the power to overcome this–this affliction and develop into a great young man. And this p
ower comes from the Holy Spirit’.

  Samuel wonders whether all the lifting and smoking he’s done has sucked the Holy Spirit from him for good, even though he’s prayed every night that God would forgive him. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t yet changed into who he should really be. Normal.

  He wonders what his mother can hear through the door, and if he would be able to make out her shape through the frosting if he turned around. He knows she has her ears pressed closely against the door like a shell, like she’s listening out for the sea.

  Dr Glenn is looking at him again. He has the same thin-lip smile on him, like he’s waiting for Samuel to say something. He could talk about Anthony forever, but it’s still too heavy in his gut.

  Samuel’s energy was taken up with hating him, after that day. It wasn’t Samuel’s fault. He just got there first. He had to get the Buckley boys on his side quick time, otherwise it would have been him that got beat down. For a long time afterwards, he spent hours sleeping, trying to make himself feel nothing.

  He’ll never see Anthony again.

  He’d written down how he’d felt in an exercise book, a continuous freestyle riff about the two of them sketched in red ink; now, there’s nothing more to say. What he wrote in the book – just scribbles – ended up in his mother’s hands when he fell asleep holding it. He half-knew it would happen one day; he was almost glad she knew, even though it meant coming here to see Dr Glenn so that he could be healed.

  He knows that when he comes out from the room, she’ll study his face, hoping for signs of change. It makes him want to sink lower in the wooden chair, until he disappears into it. He looks up again.

  ‘Would you like to pray with me?’ Dr Glenn asks.

  Samuel nods.

  ‘Dear Jesus’, he begins and Samuel drifts into the familiar pattern of words he has spoken before. For a moment, he feels free again, believing he can change.

  EXIT THROUGH THE WOUND

  NORTH MORGAN

  On Monday evening I’m attempting to pack for my trip back home, and if I were writing this the word ‘home’ would be in quotation marks, because I’m packing to go back to the place where I grew up and where my parents still live, all four of them, the place where I grew up but I haven’t lived in for twelve years, the place that I haven’t visited for sixteen months, and I suppose maybe this counts as home, but I’m not so sure. Because home is Athens, Greece, a place where I heard a young cousin around my age tell a family gathering that if his son were gay he would ‘slaughter him on his lap’, a place where I was bullied out of school for being gay at the age of 11, when I didn’t even know myself, but several of my schoolmates inexplicably already did.

  So I’m in my house in Bayswater, my big empty house, my big empty cold house that Dad bought for me and Brendan comes over and when he walks through the door he finds me standing in front of an almost empty suitcase, but against a brick wall really, indecisive, unable to figure out what I need to put in there. At this point, the only contents of the suitcase are a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and a copy of Less Than Zero, two books I could think of about being reunited with your family right before Christmas, about going back home (with quotation marks). Brendan takes a look and tells me this urban legend about The Catcher in the Rye, tells me that it’s one of these books that’s associated with the reader committing suicide, so I take it out of the suitcase and put it in my hand luggage, then ask him what else he thinks I should pack.

  I explain that I can’t decide between all the clothes, because I can’t decide who I want to be when I go back home, who I want people to think that I am. And Brendan tells me that maybe I should just be myself (’Be yourself’, he says). So I reply that I’m not sure who that is anymore, and I continue to stare, both at a mostly empty suitcase – contents: one book now – and a closet full of different versions of me, or who I am meant to be.

  That’s when my Mum calls and asks me how the packing is going and what food I eat these days so she can arrange it for me when I get there – and then tells me that she has some bad news which she hasn’t told me yet, but I’ll have to know sooner or later. I tell her to hit me, and she says that her sister, my aunt Catherine, has died. So I ask how it happened and when the funeral is and Mum tells me that she couldn’t fight it anymore (’She lost the battle’, she says) it happened two weeks ago, the funeral has already taken place, it’s all over now.

  This is just another in the long series of bad news that my parents have avoided telling me to stop me from being upset, but I guess it works both ways: they don’t tell me when close relatives die, I don’t tell them that I’m gay, they didn’t let me watch the news when I was younger, I don’t let them see the tattoos that I’m getting now that I’m older.

  Thinking about my lack of self-defenses, I ask Mum to get me some more Xanax when I go back because I’m running low. Mum says ‘okay’ and we hang up.

  I call my big brother and ask him to guess who rang me up yesterday. ‘We had a nice chat after having not spoken to each other for such a long time’, I say. My brother replies, ‘I don’t know, who?’. I tell him, ‘Aunt Catherine’. My brother tells me I’m a loser and hangs up.

  Brendan leaves and I finish packing on my own, because it’s now a few hours before my flight and this is what I have to do.

  On Tuesday morning I get to the airport, where I check in my bag, buy my parents, step-parents and brother ridiculously expensive presents because it’s their own money I’m using anyway, and make my way to the gate.

  On the plane and I’m surrounded by hundreds of Greeks who look exactly like the people I went to secondary school with. Maybe some of them are the same people I went to secondary school with, I can no longer tell. Homogeneous, Greek, very dark brown hair, dark brown eyes with black circles, disproportionate noses, stubble three minutes after they’ve shaved, talking shit. In a life where nothing went the way it was supposed to, at least I can be grateful I bypassed my national genetic code.

  With 5mg of Valium having worn off just in time for me to be annoyed by the fact that all the Greek passengers burst into applause as soon as the plane touches the ground (I fly a lot, and this is the only nation that still considers a touchdown to be something so novel or extraordinary you have to applaud it, like they didn’t expect it, like the pilot doesn’t do this for a living), we land in Athens.

  Two of my parents meet me at the airport and as step-dad drives us home it takes him less than 8 minutes to comment on my salary and ask me why I’m not making £60,000 by now. My step-dad’s only criterion for measuring people’s worth is how much money they make, which isn’t a bad one, I suppose, though I also like to take looks into consideration.

  Back at home, where I lived from the ages of 8 when my mum remarried to 17 when I left for London, I give my mum, step-dad and my brother the presents I spent too much money on and start pushing my plastic surgery idea hoping they might fork out for it. My mum seems open-minded, my step-dad laughs it off so I guess I’ll just have to ask my real dad (who has more money, cares less and sees me more infrequently), do it behind my step-dad’s back and turn up with a new face and see if he notices. I explain to my brother the changes I want to make to my eyes and nose and he tells me that if I go ahead with this I’ll look too preppy (’You’ll look way too preppy’, he says), which I understand he means as an insult but I take as the final reassurance I need that I must do this.

  I take a shower, go to the bedroom which I’ve been assigned for this holiday (the bedroom I had when I lived here is now occupied by a running machine, a TV on the wall and nothing else), make a quick phone call to Daniel in California and go to bed.

  I wake up on what people tell me is Christmas Day and the weather is unseasonably warm in Athens. It’s about 23 degrees, so I put on trousers, a polo shirt and a cardigan, which is not just another way to punish myself, just a way to cover my arms, legs, all the tattoos, most of the shame, and my mum drives me to visit my grandparents. I haven’t seen them for a coup
le of years.

  Grandma opens the door, looking composed enough for someone who’s just lost a daughter two weeks ago I suppose. She gives me a hug, sits me down and has a little talk where she tells me to take care of myself, that health is the most important thing there is, that I should be my number one priority in life, and that I should avoid eating chickens because they pump them full of hormones and I’m more than likely to grow breasts as a result, and then she goes and digs out granddad.

  Granddad hasn’t left home for four years now and he’s the closest thing to the living dead that I’ve ever seen. And not the living dead in a good way like in the Suede song of the same name thanks to post-modern, ‘I’m-so-bored’ heroin use, but the living dead in a bad way because of old age.

  Granddad tells me that I’ve grown since he last saw me (impossible), announces to everyone that I look like Brad Pitt and whispers in my ear a story about having nearly moved to Australia when he was younger to follow some girl, his mother sabotaging him and tearing up the letters the girl had sent him, and how he ended up marrying my grandmother instead.

  Then Grandma asks me what I’m planning to do over the few next days in Athens. I tell her that I’m planning to do whatever I want without letting anyone get in the way. Grandma kisses me on the forehead and then we go.